Hotel Franchise Agreements and Comfort Letters: Legal Challenges for Real Estate Lenders

Mr. Falik leads the firm's hospitality business, which includes equity and debt placement, asset acquisitions and dispositions, portfolio transactions, JV structuring, asset management, management company and brand evaluation, and strategic and capital markets advisory services. Previously, he was a Senior Managing Director and the Head of Hospitality Capital Markets at BGC Real Estate Capital Markets. Simultaneously, he was the Head of Hotel Investment Sales for Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. Prior to that, he was a Managing Director and Head of the Lodging and Leisure Investment Banking group at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. Prior to joining Cantor Fitzgerald, he was the founder and CEO of JF Capital Advisors, a lodging advisory and principal investment firm.

Guy Maisnik has over three decades of commercial real estate transactions with a strong expertise in hotels and finance. A partner and Vice Chair of the JMBM Global Hospitality Group, Guy is a senior member of the JMBM Chinese Investment Group and a partner in the JMBM Real Estate Department. He advises clients on hospitality transactions, with both a practical business and legal focus, representing buyers, sellers, lenders, opportunity funds, special servicers, REITs and developers in hotel transactions, joint ventures, hotel management agreements and franchise agreements, buying, selling and ground leasing of hotels, complex mixed-used development and fractional and timeshare structuring.

Ms. Gorman focuses her practice on hospitality law, advising clients domestically and internationally on a broad spectrum of matters, including hotel acquisitions, licensing, branding, financings, operation, and development. She has extensive experience in management, licensing, and branding agreements for hotels, restaurants, water parks, and casinos. Ms. Gorman has represented a range of institutional investors in connection with their real estate investments, as well as governmental and quasi-governmental agencies with respect to their real estate holdings. In addition to her practice, Ms. Gorman is the Chair of the Timesharing and Interval Use Committee of the Hospitality Group of the Real Property and Probate Section of the ABA; Professor in Residence (Adjunct) at the Washington College of Law of American University in Washington, D.C., as part of the Hospitality and Tourism Law Program; and on the Board of Advisors of the Georgetown University Law Center’s Hotel & Lodging Legal Summit. She regularly speaks at conferences and seminars on real estate and hospitality topics and is the author of The Law Goddess Blueprint and a contributing writer to the textbook Hotel Law – Transactions, Management and Franchising.